Tue, 28 Jun 2005

I know kicking
pillars doesn't help - that's why I kicked several boxes and a metal
container, too ;)

Beside that, I can blame Joey only for not organizing showers in the
exhibition hall for us.

By the way: Does anyone has some good tips how to reduce frustration?
Normally I either kick stuff around or go jogging. I'm not allowed the do the
last and I better not do the first. I would like to arrive in Hel with at least
one workable foot :)

Mon, 27 Jun 2005

This year we evaluated all talks during Debian-Day at LinuxTag. I just finished
to summarize it, and send it to the -events-eu list. If you attended a
talk, and would like to add a comment feel free to join the discussion.

The number of participants for each talk were estimated by Wolfgang Borgert,
who volunteered to moderate the whole Debian-Day. Thanks.

All in all I'd like to say, we did a good job, with interesting talks and
good speakers, although we had small problems when some speakers needed to
cancel their talks - special thanks to Enrico and Florian for jumping in and
taking over their talks so shortly.

Did you know, that you can kick pillars and other hard things several times with
your foot (e.g. because you are enraged
and need to let off steam) on Saturday, helping to build down an exhibition
booth, walking around several Kilometer, travelling home, sleep a bit, stand up
on Sunday, do some 30 Kilometer or so jogging, not noticing, that you have
sprain toe until Monday, when someone steps on your foot and it hurts you more,
than it should more than 36 hours after you kicked the pillar?

Yeah, that's true. And if the Subway wasn't filled that much, this guy
wouldn't have stepped on my toe, and I might still running around without
knowing it ;)

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

During the past days, I got several mails, asking me if something is wrong with
me, since I haven't bloged anything during LinuxTag. I got even asked,
if I have been there at all. It seems like people liked the live blog I did during
CeBIT and I planed to do that again.

But as you noted: Not a single blog entry during LinuxTag - and that
although I wrote a some articles. But for various reasons I decided not to publish
any of those stories during LinuxTag. But since you explicitly asked for it,
here it is, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth:

To busy to do anything!

I knew, that I had a quite tight schedule during
LinuxTag and then I found
out on Monday, that I had a small problem caused by an old calendar in my office
with several deadlines for different projects I should met. So I went to
Karlsruhe to some important dates and spend the time between them with doing
work I could have done easier at home...

No, not my style to complain this way - it was my fault, so why should I
complain here? So let's write something else:

Travelling by train is funny

As you might know, I'm one of those
long haired, nonathletic not well shaved geeks. One of those who are not liked by
athletic, good shaved people with short hairs wearing t-shirts with stupid
phrases printed with old german letters. Unfortunately my reserved seat in my
train to Karlsruhe was in front of one such guy. The phrase on his shirt could be translated
as: "The weak survive only through the mercy of the strong" When I
noticed how he disliked me looking over him, I couldn't do anything but lough.
Think about it: A guy who could chop trees with his bare hands or break all my
bones with his small finger (whichever he would like to do more), feeling
uncomfortable when I examine him, and feeling so week, that he needs to tell the
entire world, how strong he is? That's ridiculous...

No, that's not my style either. Perhaps mako could have made a good story out of
this, but my English is to bad to express, why this was so ridiculous. So let's
find something else to blog about:

Won a penguin, a bottle of champagne and a
prerelease of etch

Today I won something a some nice things, while walking through the
exhibition area. For example at the Linux-Discount booth. They
said in their newsletter, that the first customer to buy Debian Sarge on
Wednesday after 12:00 would get a bottle of champagne and - so he didn't need to
wait for three more years - "etch". And guess what: Luckily I won
it! Okay, I needed to buy a boxed version of sarge, but I planed to do so
anyway (their boxes look some kind of cool). And I have been told that the
champagne itself is more worth than the price I paid for the box. And more
important I got it:
Etch!

Later that day I won a stuffed penguin at the LinuxNewMedia booth and Frank
Ronneburg came by to give me a autographed copy of his recent book.

No, still not my style. I didn't do much things to do that, calling me
"lucky" for winning all those stuff would be complete
misinterpretation if the word "luck".

Would you like to know the truth from my point of view? I got the champagne
and the etch by setting my alarm clock to 11:45. When it rang, I left the
Skolelinux-booth with a non working network configuration, which they asked me
to fix several hours ago - and it still didn't worked when I came back a couple
of hours later. And since it was just the day of the business
congress (with no free talks) and since LinuxTag was so nice to take admission
charges, there was no large crowd waiting for 12:00. So all I had to do was to
do some smalltalk and wait for my watch to point at 12.

The same for the penguin. LinuxNewMedia raffle them every time at their booth
at every fair. I knew it pretty well, since I have spend many exhibitions near
to their booth. And through the already mentioned circumstances when they
raffled their three penguins at 16:00, there was just one other guy. Pretty
easy?

Of course I needed to leave the Debian booth during my shift to get there,
and of course I didn't told anyone else from the Debian guys about the high
changes to get penguin and etch - they could have become competitors...

No, I decided to not blog about that. Till know I most people have a good
opinion of me, not knowing that I can be a ruthless asshole if I really want
something. And who am I, to tell those guys, that they are all wrong about me?
So how about that:

The talks I visited and gave

As every year there were some interesting talks at LinuxTag. I had a list of
more than 10 talks I would like to visit. Of course I didn't really expected to
see them all. I was planed to give two talks myself and managed to be at ... two
talks.

On Tuesday I gave (again) a "News from Sarge" showing the audience
some new features and giving them some tricks. I was the very last speaker on
that day, and was surprised to find some 30 people in the audience. And I love
to be the last speaker, mainly because no one really cares, if you take more time
than the 45 minutes. After I finished the main part of my talk and mentioned
that I would like to show the new debian-installer, but couldn't since it was
just a borrowed notebook someone from the audience gave me his and I could show
much more. I think I took 45 minutes to an hour, showing the audience nice
new features and tricks in Debian GNU/Linux Sarge.

The second talk I was able to visit was Meikes talk about the debian women
project. Although she did strange things with her fingers, she did
a quite amusing and informative talk. Very well done.

I didn't made it to any other talks than this
two...

Ups! At this point the reader might think, that I made a small mistake, that
I expressed me mistakable. Didn't I just say, I was about to give two talks?
And didn't I just say, I visited one of my own talks and the one of Meike, but
no more?

To answer your question: Yes, I did write exactly that. No, although I
wrote it in a foreign language, I did not expressed me wrong. Yes, I missed my
second talk.

Great. After not showing that I'm an asshole, I decided not to
show that I'm incompetent, too.

Or would you like to read something personal like this?

The l-word

Met a nice girl the other day and I would really
like to tell you all that I have fallen in love. But I haven't, since she seems
quite happy with her current boyfriend. So out of respect and since I have
proven to be a real asshole in my last relationships. So instead of
trying getting to know her better, I become a wiener, trying to avoid her as good
as I could which was on the one hand easy, since I was often away anyway trying
to do all the work I should have done weeks ago, and on
the other hand quite hard, especially since I'm quite good at cheating
myself...

Uhm, no. The last time I wrote something similar my whole family was keeping
an eye on me, thinking I would do something stupid, having the entire project
looking after me doesn't sound very funny.

Last not least a possible entry for blog I didn't published, since I forgot
to rename the file without any extension (so it isn't recognized as blog and I
can edit and spell check it) to a .txt file, which would have been picked up by
my blog:

6

In words: Six. This is the sixth event, were I
forgot to take something important with me. This time I forgot my towel - IIRC
the last time I forgot socks and before that my shaver. The interesting thing
is, that I usually pack my baggage by an list. I really don't know how I manage to
forget something when working with a quite detailed checklist...

So now that I told you all the stuff, I did not intend to tell you: Are you
satisfied? Could you please stop sending me such emails or bugging me on irc?
Could just leave me alone? I have still some work to do and a woman to forget.
And just in case someone of my family has read so far: No, I don't intend to do
stupid things - there is to much work to be done and I have not enough time to
think about such things ;)

Tue, 14 Jun 2005

Could be a news from the "hard to believe department": A German
webmaster of a forum (which is financed by two advertisements banner) is
admonished (dictionary translation, not sure if that is the real meaning of
"abmahnen"), because on of the forum users had a pseudonym protected
by trademark laws.

The lawyer calculated the amount in dispute (another dictionary translation,
should mean "Streitwert") to 100000 EUR, and therefore his share to
5200 EUR to be payed within three days.

Luckily the webmaster if the forum
is going to court for this matter. Hope the judges understand the net better
than the trademark lawyer - or can they really expect to check every current and
later every new username for trademark infringement?

Seems that this is currently covered only by germannewstickers - sorry.
For those, who don't understand german: Just ignore it. Just an other stupid
german trademark madness. Sigh.

About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Hildesheim / Germany. He's an official Debian Developer. Beside maintaining various packages, his main task is being spokesman and event organizer of the Debian project.